I was born in a world without ad block. Some of my first songs were TV advertisements, so I am not usually surprised to find that television depends on advertisements to make money. Or at least I thought I wasn’t until I started watching Asian Dramas. Korean and Chinese television shows often have advertisements as part of the script. They will have the characters consume some food or use some car and make comments about how good the item is in what is BLATANT advertising. It was only after watching these shows that I realized that this is one thing we don’t have in most Western media. People will often dis a show for showing too many Apple computer logos or Coke cans on screen. In fact, many shows go out of their way to NOT show logos on screen. Advertisements are firmly held in their mandated commercial breaks.
However, with Ad block software, commercials can be avoided, thus the creation of integrated ads. I hate them. I really do. Inserted ads throw me out of the story, and make me distrust the integrity of the writer. One watch through of “Word of Honor” is enough to make you groan at the many references to “Wolang’s Famous Nuts” that characters “queue in line for”. I shudder to even write this, because some happy ad executive might see this blog and say. “Great idea let’s do it here!” and that just makes my gut hurt to think about. I’ve seen too many people holding cups of K-coffee while smiling at the camera in “Falling into your smile”, and I sighed at the beauty shots of instant coffee being stirred into a golden cup on “My roommate is a Gumiho”. I am tired of it. It might be different if the character moments were placed above the product placement. Although some shows are different in how blatantly they perform the ads. Some writers even try to add a few lines of dialog to explain why they are rhapsodizing over a box of Banana milk, but never do they spit the food back out or fail to turn the logo toward the camera. Uuugh!
It was only after watching this that I realized how much I feel that we have a contract with the maker of the story to show a story with integrity that is not selling out plot points to highest bidder. A contract that is most likely a fiction in my brain, because I have no guarantee that it is true.
This inability to trust the motives of the scriptwriters of television shows becomes more obvious when you realize that the shows actually do have an agenda to sell. I noticed then when watching “Go, Go Squid!” a mainland Chinese production (of no relation to Squid Game) which is about professional Hacking competitions. On the surface, it is similar to the show “Falling into your Smile” which is about competitive team gaming. The difference is that this show seems to obviously be trying to promote computer “cracking” skills to impressionable youth as a viable path of learning for the glory of China.
Scary considering that hacking has been proven to have influenced US elections, and computer chips are known to have built in vulnerabilities that threaten corporate and government security as most of the world’s chip supply is currently built in China.
Not wanting to make politics too much of an issue in a post that is mostly meant to be fluff, but watching a smiling actor incouraging kids to learn cracking skills gives me a bit of a “Mr Robot” paranoia of people coming for me. These are some of the discomforts that hit me when I started watching Asian Dramas for the first time. Truth be told, they still squick me, but I’ve gotten a bit of a tolerance for them now. These days, I will see the carefully stacked juice boxes, and hardly blink. But it makes me wonder what people will think in a few hundred years when they look back on the oddities of past stories. Probably much like the students slugging through a Dicken’s work in English class who are told that Dicken’s was paid by the word. Understanding may be given, but forgiveness never will.
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